Mach Effect progress

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Your point is, that knowing what limited interstellar observation capabilities we have, you maintain that we ought to be able to ascertain extra-stellar machinations across our entire galaxy?

Are you joking?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

williatw
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Location: Ohio

Post by williatw »

GIThruster wrote:Your point is, that knowing what limited interstellar observation capabilities we have, you maintain that we ought to be able to ascertain extra-stellar machinations across our entire galaxy?

Are you joking?
Uhh...no I think:
williatw wrote:Artificially generated power at some point might rival that of natural star production. Something well on the way to a Kardashev level 3 civilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_ ... on_methods
The effects of this kind of techno power civilizations would be hard to miss, not subtle effects you have to be looking just so with just the right equipment to detect. The simplest explanation by far for what we see (or don't see) if practical warp drive tech is for real, is the one where there are few advanced civilizations if any active at any one time.
Pretty hard to miss a galactic wide civilization using mega Terawatts of power for this or that.

Your Missus has my sympathies...she must get really tired having to repeat herself over and over.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Sorry William but your supposes have nothing to do with what ought to be.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

GeeGee wrote:williatw is posing a hypothetical, and you could replace Sonny's warp drive with Woodward's wormhole generator.
Actually, I think you might be able to replace Dr. White's proposed mechanics with Jim Woodward's negative mass generation, and still achieve "boost" FTL. Boost is presented as a straightforward derivation of the Alcubierre metric, and the Alcubierre metric has been tightly tied to negative mass mechanisms since it was conceived in 1994.
GeeGee wrote:The bottom line he's posing is that if you allow for any type of practical FTL propulsion/transportation system, then it makes space travel trivial, and removes many of the limits we've imposed in our models of galactic colonization. Megascale structures are already quite plausible and likely with known physics, but when you add wormhole generators to the mix, it gives you practically instant access to the galaxy's resources, making them even more feasible.
Using wormholes, you could have your bed room on Mars, your living room in orbit of Vega, and your garage at Zeta Reticuli. Concepts such as property and shipping costs go sideways. Distributed architectures for everything. Might suppress signatures...
Vae Victis

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

djolds1 wrote:Using wormholes, you could have your bed room on Mars, your living room in orbit of Vega, and your garage at Zeta Reticuli. Concepts such as property and shipping costs go sideways. Distributed architectures for everything. Might suppress signatures...
You're ignoring the huge requirements of "absurdly benign wormholes". Your posturing does nothing for real science.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

paperburn1
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Location: Third rock from the sun.

Post by paperburn1 »

Just to repeat myself one more time, why travel? You could easy colonize a solar system with 50 million planets/ structures in the "life zone" and the energy requirements to do so would be small compared to flitting about the milky way.(given our current understanding of power required, time required ect. ect ..) The diversity could be huge concerning we are already genetically manipulating our self and food products . There really would not be a need to explore much farther than your own back yard for adventure and that would most probably be more places than the number of inhabitable planets in easy travel range.
Think of the show Firefly, lots of engineered worlds to be developed all within light seconds of each other. All you would need is a polywell reactor and one G acceleration that would put everywhere in the system within days travel. why explore elsewhere except for the odd stranger that would venture fourth to a different star system. You want advanced civilizations, you just talk to them if we can figure out how they are communicating. what is it they say, the simplest solution is usually the correct one.

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

GIThruster wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Using wormholes, you could have your bed room on Mars, your living room in orbit of Vega, and your garage at Zeta Reticuli. Concepts such as property and shipping costs go sideways. Distributed architectures for everything. Might suppress signatures...
You're ignoring the huge requirements of "absurdly benign wormholes". Your posturing does nothing for real science.
1) Stargates remain notional, not real;

2) Just exploring possibilities;

3) Chill out.
Vae Victis

R.Nkolo
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Joined: Wed Jun 09, 2010 5:34 am

Post by R.Nkolo »

You should read the Hyperion-Cantos-Series, if you haven't already.
The possibilities you're describing are used there in the narrative.
The farcasters are instantaneous transportation devices "developed" by the TechnoCore(a Group of A.I. seeking to build an all-knowing god-like entity) through the use of the "Void which Binds", a Domain at the Planck-length.
djolds1 wrote:
GIThruster wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Using wormholes, you could have your bed room on Mars, your living room in orbit of Vega, and your garage at Zeta Reticuli. Concepts such as property and shipping costs go sideways. Distributed architectures for everything. Might suppress signatures...
You're ignoring the huge requirements of "absurdly benign wormholes". Your posturing does nothing for real science.
1) Stargates remain notional, not real;

2) Just exploring possibilities;

3) Chill out.

chrismb
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Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 6:00 pm

Post by chrismb »

paulmarch wrote:My understanding is that per Einstein's General Relativity Theory (GRT) space and time when considered as a single entity (spacetime) can be distorted or bent from its normally flat or undistorted form by the presence of mass & energy in any form.
That'd be a hell of a lot of energy, and many 10's of orders of magnitude greater than petajoules, even!

The Earth is a mass of some ~10^42J, and even that can only muster a ~10m/s acceleration!


paulmarch wrote: it takes very large concentrations of mass/energy to distort spacetime even a little bit from its normally flat self, unless that is we can find a way to dynamically reduce this spring constant in the volume of interest. Dr. White thinks that through the application of alternating electromagnetic (E&M) fields of sufficiently high amplitudes and frequency
Are there really any connections between gravitational and electromagnetic fields in GRT? It would seem false to claim such a connection, without an experimental basis to suggest there is more than GRT implies.

No conventional theory AND no experimental observations = an extant fantasy.

Distortion of space-time would also lead to distortion of the matter embedded within that distortion. If the distortion was so great as to exceed an acceleration beyond c within the length of a physical object, then would that object not be instantly destroyed by mechanical loads, unless it was a point-like particle.

A person free-falling feet-first into a black hole (which is a space-time distortion much smaller than the one proposed - it would only accelerate to c by the event horizon) would be torn into bits due to the differential gravity fields between their feet and head long before they got anywhere near c.

djolds1
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Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Post by djolds1 »

R.Nkolo wrote:You should read the Hyperion-Cantos-Series, if you haven't already.
The possibilities you're describing are used there in the narrative.
The farcasters are instantaneous transportation devices "developed" by the TechnoCore(a Group of A.I. seeking to build an all-knowing god-like entity) through the use of the "Void which Binds", a Domain at the Planck-length.
Scifi ruminations on the possibilities of wormholes? Explore the Orion's Arm site. Micro-gauge communications lines between star systems, raw materials feed lines from one system to another, etc. Food for thought and amusement. Obviously what I posted earlier was intended as an extreme example. My philosophy when engaging in futurism is define the far edge where suspension of disbelief breaks down, and then work back to the progressively more and more plausible from there.

But Hyperion-Cantos is now in my Amazon wishlist. Thanks. :)
Vae Victis

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Chris, as you have noted recently, you were involved in another thread on M-E a few years ago, before this one. I take it you've read a bit about Kip Thorne's wormhole work since the late 1980s, Alcubierre's warp drive from 1994, Woodward's work etc. As we know from everything that has been written, the theory is all able concentrating a large amount of negative energy into a thin shell in order to distort spacetime.

Earth is a big piece of rock and a bit of other stuff which creates a gravity well. People are theorizing about concentrating energy into a much smaller area.

Every posited scheme explicitly does not have the problem that "Distortion of space-time would also lead to distortion of the matter embedded within that distortion." The distortion of space time happens in the thin shell layer where the negative energy is concentrated. Whatever is inside that shell sits in relatively flat spacetime, and this bit of flat spacetime is carried along inside the distortion. Or, in the case of wormholes, the spacetime in the "throat" is more or less flat, with the distortion happening around the edges.

Obviously it's likely to be very difficult to generate a lot of negative energy and keep it contained in a very thin shell. Sonny White and Woodward, although they both come at it with different theories, seem to think that it might be much easier than we think. I suspect they're being over-optimistic.

I can see Woodward's theory potentially panning out and leading to a very efficient sublight drive within decades, which would give us the solar system and viable interstellar probes to nearby star systems. I guess I could see White's QVF panning out too, but I find Woodward's idea to be more grounded in terms of the last century of physics. My suspicion though, is that if it is possible to create a stable wormhole or warp bubble, it will take a very long time to learn how to actually do it.

CaptainBeowulf
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Post by CaptainBeowulf »

Another solution to the Fermi Paradox is that when intelligent species hit a certain point in their biological/technological evolution, they very quickly go to a singularity. As someone else has mentioned, in some cases they might miniaturize in order to reduce energy requirements, but just as possible is that they turn into something like Charles Stross' Eschaton.

A Godlike Eschaton type intelligence may not need very many physical artifacts to keep it going. In order to avoid being bothered by, or interfering with, other creatures it might park its physical base somewhere it wouldn't be noticed, like in intergalactic space well away from any nearby galaxy clusters. Or, if something like string theory with several other dimensions is correct, it might hide itself successfully from the three dimensional world in some of the "rolled up" dimensions.

I don't think we would notice a few Dyson spheres parked millions of light years away. Even if the IR signal made it to us in a detectable fashion, it may just not have had time to get here yet.

In order to detect other civilizations, we have to assume that they would evolve towards Kardashev-II and then Kardashev-III type civilizations still composed of millions/billions/trillions of individual beings, becoming far more advanced than us in many respects but still going around building large structures like we do. Galactic scale engineering might be a viable approach for such civilizations, but it might be quite irrelevant to singularities.

I could envisage K-II and K-III civilizations interacting with us directly, for it might simply be analogous to us interacted with a newly discovered tribe of hunter-gatherer humans, or just with other species of mammals. In this case aliens might abduct people to study and tag them just like we track and tag animals such as wolves, bears etc.

On the other hand, a true singularity super-intelligence could very well see us more the way we see ants. It simply would not be bothered to attempt interaction, unless there was a good reason. For instance, it might decide to poke and prod us in the right direction to becoming another benign singularity with which it could interact, and at the same time it would attempt to forestall the evolution of some sort of malevolent or malignant singularity from our civilization.

williatw
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Post by williatw »

CaptainBeowulf wrote:Another solution to the Fermi Paradox is that when intelligent species hit a certain point in their biological/technological evolution, they very quickly go to a singularity. As someone else has mentioned, in some cases they might miniaturize in order to reduce energy requirements, but just as possible is that they turn into something like Charles Stross' Eschaton.

A Godlike Eschaton type intelligence may not need very many physical artifacts to keep it going. In order to avoid being bothered by, or interfering with, other creatures it might park its physical base somewhere it wouldn't be noticed, like in intergalactic space well away from any nearby galaxy clusters. Or, if something like string theory with several other dimensions is correct, it might hide itself successfully from the three dimensional world in some of the "rolled up" dimensions.

I don't think we would notice a few Dyson spheres parked millions of light years away. Even if the IR signal made it to us in a detectable fashion, it may just not have had time to get here yet.

In order to detect other civilizations, we have to assume that they would evolve towards Kardashev-II and then Kardashev-III type civilizations still composed of millions/billions/trillions of individual beings, becoming far more advanced than us in many respects but still going around building large structures like we do. Galactic scale engineering might be a viable approach for such civilizations, but it might be quite irrelevant to singularities.

I could envisage K-II and K-III civilizations interacting with us directly, for it might simply be analogous to us interacted with a newly discovered tribe of hunter-gatherer humans, or just with other species of mammals. In this case aliens might abduct people to study and tag them just like we track and tag animals such as wolves, bears etc.

On the other hand, a true singularity super-intelligence could very well see us more the way we see ants. It simply would not be bothered to attempt interaction, unless there was a good reason. For instance, it might decide to poke and prod us in the right direction to becoming another benign singularity with which it could interact, and at the same time it would attempt to forestall the evolution of some sort of malevolent or malignant singularity from our civilization.
That's a possibility they evolve into what you suggest or some kind of "Q-Continuum" type of superbeing/hive mind whatever. Seems to me that even that works better if I assume that technological species are rare, maybe 0-10 active at any one time. Don't think it would really explain, thousands, or millions of different species around. Hard to believe if many have come before us that none would go the K-III way with large power generating constructs detectible over great distances. Even if they later evolved beyond such things, hard to believe that millions of yrs of carving up the galaxy for this or that wouldn't leave large footprints. UFO Greys (not that I am suggesting that is undisputed evidence), don't seem that advanced over us, maybe centuries to low millennia but not superbeings. Abducting people supposedly performing medical experiments on their reproductive organs even reproducing with us making "hybrids" is more technologically advanced than us, but hardly a god-like superbeing.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

My idea is that most surviving intelligent species were smart enough not to attract attention themselves until they managed to reach a developmental level that would allow them confront a potentially hostile intelligent species with the technological level needed for FTL travel on a grander scale. Looking at how life on our planet is mostly a matter of eating or being eaten, it is not a far fetch to assume that this is the same everywhere else ( you need evolutionary pressure after all in order to evolve).
The more advanced species might be roaming the galaxy for habitable planets and we might just by chance not have been discovered yet ( an insignificant system in an outer spiral arm). If they are smart they will look in starclusters first where distances between systems are smaller.
Therefore I think that we would be smart to lay low and not do anything to attract attention.
Personally I dont want earth to become a colony of some alien species, nor do I want to end up on someones dinner table.

paperburn1
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Post by paperburn1 »

[To serve man is a cookbook agghhh!

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